I whipped up a little
Javascript library to format relative
timestamps. Instead of labelling blog entries something nerdy and
confusing like "2005-09-07 08:32 Z", ago lets you say "3 hours ago". You can see
it here on my blog. The idea was
shamelessly stolen from NetNewsWire, Flickr, and a dozen other apps. I
implemented it here on my blog to
help me deal with time zones; I'm in Zürich, my server is in Texas but
running in UTC, and most of my friends are in California.

To use it, put some javascript in your document like

document.write(ago(1126162027))

It will be replaced with a friendly English string in the client's browser.
The number is a Unix seconds since epoch timestamp.
The clever thing here is that by doing this in
Javascript, the relative timestamps look correct even if the page is
pulled from a cache. (It will be broken if the client's clock is wrong,
but that's their problem.)

The code
is freely available, public domain. You'll also find JsUnit tests, a
demo,
and a Blosxom plugin to make it easy to add to my blog.